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the direction of two young women at the next table. ‘They’re lovely, aren’t they? I wouldn’t mind one for supper. Two, in fact. Do you know, Michael, I’m fifty-six, but I still like a feed now and then.’ His lean features, suntanned and clean-shaven, wrinkled into anxiety when he saw my umbrella hooked onto the chair. ‘Where did you get that gamp?’
    â€˜Oh, I just picked it up.’
    The sight of it worried him. ‘I don’t like it.’
    â€˜You can lump it, then. It’s mine, and I’m very fond of it. I’ll love it till my dying day. Uncle Randolph used to go to Ascot with it before the War.’
    â€˜Nicked it, eh? Looks fishy to me. Anyway, do you want to hear my story or don’t you? I know you do, and it’s good of you to answer my call so quickly. Michael will always stand by a friend in need, I said. He’s a good six-footer who not only looks after himself in a tight corner, but never lets an old pal down. I didn’t have firmer friends in the Sherwood Foresters. I don’t like the look of that umbrella, though. Where did you get it from?’
    I told him.
    â€˜That’s hardly calculated to set my mind at rest. It looks very suspicious.’ He scraped the last stains of custard from all three dishes. ‘Times have changed, Michael. You can’t be too careful these days. Ten years ago things were comparatively civilised. If you strayed from the straight and narrow all you might end up with was a nasty scar on the lee side of your clock, but nowadays you might get chopped into bits and sprinkled over a Thames bridge from a plastic bag. You vanish without trace. The seagulls gulp every morsel. London pigeons are starting to eat flesh. A few months ago I happened to be the unwilling witness of a fight between the Green Toe Gang and Moggerhanger’s Angels, and as a set-to it made the Battle of Bosworth Field look like a pub brawl at the Elephant and Castle. Things have altered, right enough.’
    He plucked the small feather out of his hatband and put it into his mouth. ‘You’ve been away, so you don’t know how things are. How could you?’ He spat the bedraggled feather onto a plastic pie plate. ‘Well, it’s not too bad, either, because otherwise I wouldn’t have asked you to come down here and see me, would I?’
    â€˜Wouldn’t you? Listen, I’ll go right off my bonce if you don’t tell me why you asked me to leave my cosily furnished railway station on such a foul day.’
    Raindrops were running down the window. They broke out in separate places and made a dash for it, as I should have done, increasing in force and strength, born from stationary globules on the way down, like a crowd gathering on the way to a riot. Sometimes they travelled horizontally, lonely figures going a long way, till thwarted by the end of the glass.
    â€˜I’ll tell you why I’m here, Michael, and why you’re here. I want your advice and support. A few months ago I was at a loose end. My girlfriend had left me, my mother had died, and I was running out of cash. I’d earned fifty thousand pounds bringing back a consignment of don’t-ask-what from Kashmir. I carried it in the false bottom of a butterfly collection, and got through the customs a treat. I had a beard (grey, unfortunately), little pebbledash glasses and a bush hat. I looked so theatrical they never thought I could be putting on an act. My false passport, fixed up by the Green Toe Gang, said I was a lepidopterist. I even had forged documents from the British Museum of Natural History. When those lads of the Green Toe Gang do something, they do it properly. No flies on them, Michael. No flies, no files, as they say. There aren’t any marks where they’ve been, either, not like on the rest of us.
    â€˜It was the best job I ever pulled. Remember when we was smuggling gold ten years ago for Jack Leningrad